Re: [school-discuss] Project developing free school server solution

[Bjoern Scheuermann <bjoern@solution.de>]

Am Freitag, 17. Oktober 2003 23:43 schrieb Paolo Pumilia:
> We are giving rise to a board of directors aimed at providing a linux
> distribution to schools ad guiding a profesional remote assitance service
> to school net administrators.

This sounds like what we have here for quite some time now. We have two 
full-time support technicians, paid by the administration to help local 
schools to use the server solution we are developing.

Probably we'll even integrate a "remote help" feature for these technicians in 
the forthcoming version, so a local admin can let the support staff access 
his servers without the need to give away his passwords. Of course he can do 
this in his web interface. :-)

> We are considering skolelinux.
> What are the differences between that and your distribution ?

I'd describe it in the following way:

If you (= the local admin) already know a lot about network protocols, user 
management and so on, you have a lot of time and you want do build your "own" 
solution and just get a few hints, how a typical school setup could look 
like, then K12Linux (or one of the many other, similar projects and web 
pages) is good to look at.

If you know _something_ about how Linux user/group management works, how you 
use a shell, how you setup an internet connection, how to update your 
distribution, what a cronjob is, then you should consider skolelinux.

If you don't want to know and don't want to need to know how all this 
internally works, what Linux file access control flags look like, how you 
setup user and/or mail quotas, whether you need a particular software package 
or not, our project could be what you're looking for.

We're also considering to provide pre-installed servers, as well "real" 
servers for big installations as appliance servers for small schools with 
just a few clients. There are interested hardware manufacturers. So we could 
have really some kind of "plug&play" for the local school.

> I think some work has been already done by skolelinux (www.skolelinux.no)

Yes, it has. Hilaire Fernandes has also mentioned this in this list, and I 
think I've pointed out how and why our approach is in some points a little 
different.

> Please tell me more about your project.

Unfortunately I don't have much material available in English by now, 
otherwise I'd love to send it to you. I've mentioned some more points in my 
last few mails. What do you want to know? Are you specifically interested in 
some technical and/or organizational aspects?

We're currently still in our planning phase. And we're always open for new 
ideas. So I think your possibilities to influence the way we go could be 
quite big. :-)


Bjoern